“Destruction
and distortion dominates the town, cause money makes the world go round…”
These were the words sung by my good friend
and role model Dee Dee Davis on Topnovil’s 2010 album Same Old Story, and
they’re words that are especially relevant to what we call the “culture” of
today. I refer to culture in inverted commas because I refuse to sully the term
by using it to describe sub-simian species like Kim Kardashian and the walking
haircuts of One Direction as most commentators would. I’m not a cultural
commentator by any means. I’m a guy with a blog on the internet, an
overinflated sense of importance, an opinion and a very large penis. The fact
that a schmuck like me can see what’s wrong with the world shows just how
fucked it is.
It’s pretty simplistic to put things down
to one word solutions, but sometimes that old prick Occam was right. It’s all
about money. Simple as that.
Now maybe I shouldn’t be talking about
money being evil when I’ve freely admitted I would go back to sucking dick on
Darlinghurst street corners for $50 to make enough money to get Weezer tickets.
I’m not saying money itself is evil, I’m saying the way we fetishise it to the
point where it and its acquisition (And the shit that comes with having money)
is all that matters.
The reasons for this are pretty simple.
Western society (and most of capitalist Asia) are held by the balls by
multinational corporate powers. These exist for one reason and one alone – to
make as much money as possible. The only rational reason for the existence of
mankind to a corporation is to make them money. Corporations are whores in the
purest sense of the term. They are big, impersonal (fuck what Mitt Romney says)
and could give two fucks about you other than what you can do for them.
Therefore, from cradle to grave, we’re fed
this idea that to make money is a good thing, because it’s ours! We get to buy
all this cool shit! The cool shit that we buy from our corporate overlords, of
course. Corporations push for individual tax breaks and government payments to
the voting idiots of society at the expense of social programs that were once
considered vital for a functional society because they’ve trained us well and
know we’ll lap it up like dogs. We get money, we spend it on their stuff. We
spend it on their stuff because that’s what we’ve been trained to do through
their media. If Kanye sings that a Lamborghini Mercy will make your chick thirsty, well, maybe I can’t afford a Lamborghini Murcielago (a work of true automotive beauty, by the way, and
totally not worthy of a denigrating shortening by the biggest dickhead in the
pop music scene of today) but I sure can afford to spend money on wanking up my
car to get it a bit closer to that and maybe make some bitches thirsty.
The
first response will probably be something like “oh, you’re a fucking hypocrite,
you’re typing this on a computer and you talked about wanting Weezer tickets.”
Of course I’m a hypocrite for saying this in the truest sense of the word. (I’m
not just typing this shit on any computer – it’s a MacBook Air Pro). It’s not
possible to live without being a corporate consumer today unless you go live in
a cave and I don’t really want to do that. I’m a hypocrite, I admit it. The
only difference between me and the rest of the world is that I know what I’m
doing is fucked up. I can see the forest from the trees.
So what can you or anyone else do to stop
it? Absolutely nothing. This is the world we live in right now and it’s too
late to change it. Just like we had the Stone Age, the Middle Ages and the
Industrial Age, future historians will look at this period forward as the
Corporate Age.
The Corporate Age itself is the result of
more than 30 years of unfettered neo-liberal economic policy by the USA and
Britain which eventually trickled down to the rest of the world. (One wonders
if this was what the Chicago economists who first proposed neoliberalism
actually had in mind when they termed “trickle-down economics.”) When Adam
Smith first proposed unfettered free markets and the “invisible hand”, he
foresaw markets of essentially infinite competition. In Smith’s mind, free
markets were meant to eliminate monopoly/oligopoly power, not multiply them and
drive smaller firms out/into them as it has done. Clearly he didn’t come up
with the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Theoretically, I can see a way Smith’s
conception of free markets could have occurred – in an infant market with start
up firms. Indeed, one of the few examples of such – the technology industry,
which was nascent around the period when neo-liberalism became a dominant
ideology, has managed to remain mostly free and open. Whether that was because
of government regulations or the nature of the platforms upon which modern
technological advances are built is debatable, but that’s how it’s turned out.
In industries such as oil and financial
services (to name but two obvious examples, but this was how most sectors of the
economy were at the time), however, deregulation occurred when the market was established with a few
major firms at the top and some smaller ones snapping behind. All liberalism
did there was allow the major powers to enhance their grip on their sector of
the market by crushing the little guys and getting to a point where they
became, to use a common quote heard around the Great Financial Crisis, “too big
to fail.” Therefore, their governing arms (as any government in a capitalist
society is, whatever term they may use to call themselves) use the money they
had given them (originally to continue to enact favourable laws) to bail them
out of their screwup and let them keep running.
Again, and I can’t stress this enough,
THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT. No amount of Occupy Wall Street protests
and handwringing will change a thing because this is the world we live in, that
we and our parents created through constant support for neo-liberal policies
that were supposed to make us rich. It may sound that I’m flagellating
corporations here – honestly, I’m not, because they exist for this sole reason.
It’s like letting a mob of fat kids waddle wild in a cake shop and then
wondering why they’re fat and you’re out of cake after they’re done. We were
the ones who fucked up and we did so too badly to fix it now. Eventually
something will bring the corporate age to an end, but it won’t happen in our
lifetimes.
Me? I just wish I couldn’t see the forest
from the trees. It would make life so much easier.
